[Joshua May]

Originally Posted by Mike Ciance

video editing software...

is there any way to add black in max alone? i was thinking that for a makeshift method it would be possible to just make a camera aimed away from everything so that the resulting view would be black, and have the view set to the camera for a few seconds.

You can do that or just aim it at a plane with a black texture.

Originally Posted by Mike Ciance

is editing software absolutely needed to make an animation that fits all the requirements?

Yeah, 2 years ago when I did my teams animation, we rendered straight outta max. Just had all the scenes in one file, and set up a single camera to be at different points in the file based on scenes. For the screens, we just set up the camera in front of a screen that had a texture of the title.